I remember when I was 6 or 7 years old, my father was an ocean-going sailor. Once, when he returned from a voyage, he took me to visit and play on the working cargo ship that was docked in the harbor. I followed my father to visit his room and the rooms of several other crew members in the cabin, and I noticed that the walls of their rooms were painted with colors and pictures. My father told me that during long and tedious sea voyages, he would spend his free time painting murals on the walls of his room. At first he only painted his own room, but later when other crew members saw his murals, they invited him to paint on their walls as well. Since then, I have been fascinated by my father’s murals, their pigments and colors.
When I was 14 years old, I dropped out of school. I traveled alone to China for a year to study Western oil painting. There, I learned traditional oil painting techniques and received artistic enlightenment from my instructor, which has always given me a passion for painting. This journey opened up a whole new perspective for me: It opened my eyes to the Eastern and Western cultures’ differences between China in the early days of reform and opening up, and Hong Kong, where I was living at the time, where . At the same time, it also made me begin to be interested in and concerned about the new thinking that was beginning to germinate in contemporary Chinese art at that time.
When I was 24, I finally decided to set sail in the ocean of art.